Pyun, Hye-Young: The Hole

WINNER OF THE SHIRLEY JACKSON AWARD ‘A superbly insidious and atmospheric chiller about caring and cruelty: grief, isolation, helplessness and existential fear‘ Guardian ‘A Korean take on Misery ‘ Time ‘Suspenseful, eerie and surprisingly profound‘ Big Issue Oghi wakes in a hospital bed unable to speak or move. The car accident that killed his wife has left him trapped in his own body and under the control of his mother-in-law, as she grieves the loss of her only child. Isolated from his friends and neglected by his nurse, Oghi‘s world shrinks to the room he lies in and his memories of his wife, a sensitive woman who found solace in cultivating her garden. But as Oghi remains alone and paralysed, his mother-in-law is hard at work in the now-abandoned garden, uprooting what her daughter had worked so hard to plant and obsessively digging larger and larger holes... A bestseller in Korea, The Hole is a superbly crafted and deeply unnerving novel about the horrors of isolation and neglect in all of its banal and brutal forms. ‘Like Hitchcock or Abe, Pyun peers head on into the unnerving depths of human grief‘ Blake Butler, author of 300,000,000 ‘While reading The Hole , you‘ll find yourself suddenly doubting everything‘ Kyung-sook Shin, New York Times bestselling author of Please Look After Mother